To help communities understand how climate change will impact them, Atkins developed the City Simulator tool. This agent-based tool creates a digital twin of a city and then evolves it from present day to mid-century as it both grows in economy and population and is hit with disasters that are influenced by climate change. As the potentially deep impacts of the COVID19 pandemic became apparent in early 2020, Akins accelerated its plan to add epidemic spread modeling to City Simulator. Modeling epidemic spread required two components: a model of daily contacts between residents and an infection module, which defines the probability of transmission given contact. City Simulator’s agent-based approach - where individual avatars of the real city population go to work, school, restaurants, and so on – provided a built-in contact model, where the distance between agents could be estimated based on their assumed relationship. For example, if they were co-workers in the same office they’d have a much higher probability of being infected than if they were in different businesses within the same building. Using the new epidemic spread module, Atkins conducted a series of vulnerability assessments and stress tests for proposed mitigation actions like social distancing. Key results showed that social distancing can work, but only with strict compliance, and that timing of when mitigation actions are taken is critical. This presentation will describe the development of the module and the study findings.
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